Experiment with Polystyrol Balls
Cycles, or really any renderer for graphics is not a completely physically accurate model of light. Cycles in particular uses an rgb based model for colour, rather than a spectral model (luxrender does use a spectral model for colour which may get slightly better results for stuff like this). As far as I know, neither bother to model things like coherence or polarity or anything like that.

Either way, material properties and light effects are vastly simplified in order to provide visually appealing results in a reasonable amount of time and to make it easy for artists to build materials without detailed scientific knowledge of the interactions between light and various materials.  

These kind of rendering engines are not and never will be scientific simulations. If you want to find a scientific simulation of light, you will need to look elsewhere for programs build for that purpose.